Yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had his fan page hacked. The virtual intruders posted the message you see at right, which reads,

Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup201

The message was removed fairly quickly (by taking down the page), but not before it received some 1800 “likes” from Zuckerberg fans. Facebook still hasn’t commented on the incident.

I do want to remind people not to panic. As much as it looks like Facebook is insecure, this was a targeted attack against a high-profile page. It’s pretty unlikely someone would be hacking your personal Facebook page just to find out where you went to highschool.

This rumor’s been floating around for a couple weeks and finally came true. MySpace is officially cutting 47 percent of its workforce, some 500 employees. The company said the cuts are “to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability.”

I’ve got some bad news for you MySpace. Even after the cuts, it looks like you guys might still employ more people than you have users. You’re gonna need traffic if you want these cuts to work. I just don’t know how realistic that is.

It is finally, really, actually, verifiably true: Verizon will officially offer the iPhone starting February 10th of this year. Lowell McAdam made the announcement from New York this morning, saying, “If the press write something long enough, eventually it comes true. We’re very very excited about our announcement today.”

It is definitely exciting news. People have been waiting a very long time for this kind of announcement, though personally, I won’t be switching. Not yet anyway.

For one thing, Verizon’s network will be slower. More reliable? Sure, but still slower. I live in a small town in North Carolina and I rarely see service congestion on my iPhone. While AT&T is definitely unreliable in other parts of the world, it’s just fine here. My data is snappy and I rarely drop calls. The only reason to switch would be in network calling to the rest of my family, but I have enough rollover minutes saved up to more than accommodate my dialing habits.

At the very earliest, I’d think about switching in June of 2012. By then, the iPhone 6 should be out, and Verizon’s network should be fast enough to warrant the change. I’ll also, god willing, be living in a different part of the country, and I’d like the assurance that I’ll have a reliable network there.

There is one extremely compelling reason to switch, even if you aren’t having network trouble. The Verizon iPhone will allow you to create a Wi-Fi hotspot. After traveling near the holidays and getting stuck in airports with $7/hour internet fees, I would love few things more than the ability to use my phone as a hotspot. I would say that AT&T will get this feature soon, but the truth is it probably won’t. AT&T has enough data trouble as it is. Clogging its network with more data means reliability will likely take another hit, something AT&T can’t really afford. We’ll see how Verizon handles the iPhone data load.

Just so everyone is clear, this is a CDMA version of the phone. You will not be able to port your AT&T phone to Verizon. If you’re looking to sell your phone to subsidize your transfer, you better list that thing today. I’d imagine we’ll see a glut of GSM iPhones hit Craigslist and eBay over the next couple days.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has again nailed down the reason the event on Tuesday will be hosted by Verizon in New York and not Apple in California. This isn’t really an Apple event. While Apple will make a metric shit-ton of money off the deal, you can’t really ask Steve Jobs to get on stage and say, “Hey, look how magical this network is on the same phone you’ve had for six months. No no, nothing’s different about the phone. Just the network. That’s all.”

There’s more talk than usual about Facebook these days, thanks to the big investment from Goldman-Sachs that could lead to an IPO this year. As investment opportunity looms large for the social giant, a lot of people are carefully examining the company to see whether or not it’s worth dropping some cash on shares.

There’s a lot to read, and while some of it is virtually useless (sorry, I don’t care whether 50 Cent thinks Facebook is worth $50 billion or not), there are a couple of standout articles. The most interesting I found was an article on CNN, in which Douglas Rushkoff compares the potential Facebook IPO to the AOL/Time Warner merger. It sounds a little off base, until you see just what Rushkoff is talking about.

Indeed, 11 years ago this week, when AOL announced its $350 billion merger with Time Warner, I was asked to write an OpEd for the New York Times explaining what the deal between old and new media companies really meant. I said that AOL was cashing in its over-valued dotcom stock in order to purchase a stake in a “real” media company with movie studios, theme parks and even cable. In short, the deal meant AOL knew their reign was over.

The Times didn’t run the piece. Of course, the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL’s revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly.